February 26, 2009

This just gets better and better. Allow me to pat myself on the back for this observation from the previous blog post:

“[T]hese Congresspeople really didn’t listen to their constituents or care that much about their problems. But when the media does its job, it sure can be a pain in the rear for them, can’t it?”

In the wake of the explosive CBS report on management incompetence and possible corruption in the FEMA office in New Orleans, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has shown her fire. This is a stunning change over the course of exactly seven days, which is when it became public that the stimulus didn’t do anything for Katrina-ravaged areas and several members of Congress were quoted rather nonchalantly saying that the money was tied up. Now that CBS has revealed the origin of at least part of this tie-up, it looks like things may—be still my heart—actually be done about it. Thank you, Katie Couric and Armen Keteyian.

As that story link shows, Landrieu has made it no secret that her fiery reaction today is owing specifically to the CBS report. She has called for the resignation of the manager named most prominently in that report, who has been accused by employees several dozen times of varied ethical violations, including racial discrimination, cronyism, intimidation, and sexual harassment. I think that, despite how bad it looks (and probably is), the guy is entitled to an impartial investigation. But Landrieu covers that ground too, calling for exactly what I have been calling for on this blog:

See, this is how it needs to be done. FEMA can’t be trusted to investigate itself in an honest manner. No government agency can, because there is the obvious conflict of interest. But the department it is a part of can do that. The Secretary has a personal interest in doing it correctly, in fact; it reflects badly on her for there to be ongoing corruption and malfeasance in such a prominent agency of her department.

I must admit that I am astounded that this kind of storm has erupted so quickly. It is rapid intensification to rival that which actually occurred in the hurricane itself, and it’s stunning to those of us who live in the Gulf region relatively close to the damaged areas and have witnessed little but delays and slow motion for three and a half years. CBS may have been looking into this FEMA office long before the news broke a week ago that there was no Katrina money in the stimulus, but not necessarily; the type of research that is spoken of could have been done relatively quickly. Interviewing employees and looking into complaint records wouldn’t take that long. Even if it was a long-standing project for CBS, the timeline of all this is amazing.

A few more stories like this, and I might even drop of some my Katrina-related cynicism.

February 25, 2009

CBS has a long history of tackling controversial news stories. They seem to regard themselves as an investigative outlet, something that cable news sources (which seem to specialize in stenography, propaganda, and vacuous entertainment) don’t quite get. Evidently the recent news that the stimulus bill does not include money specifically earmarked for Katrina recovery got their attention, as did the (in my opinion) ridiculous and unacceptable explanation that this money was tied up in bureaucracy. Props to them for that. Tonight they ran a story about the particulars of that bureaucratic tie-up. It’s about as ugly as anyone could imagine, including me—and that should say something.

A major part of the problem, as might be predicted, lies in the FEMA office in New Orleans. It has apparently been going on ever since the hurricane, and (again, as might be expected), the George W. Bush administration never saw fit to do anything about it, nor did the Democratic Congress see fit to call for investigations into it. If CBS’s discoveries are to be believed, what is going on is a form of disaster profiteering—in this case, an upper-level manager with a six-figure salary who wants to keep that cushy job for as long as possible and who is taking actions to lock up the recovery process to accomplish that. Almost $4 billion of the New Orleans money that this man was in charge of is still tied up, and in the meantime, the infrastructure decays and turns into a skeleton. His employees allege that he is stonewalling on purpose because he wants to keep looting the federal government for his plush salary, and apparently he has assumed (correctly, so far) that he can get away with it because no one really cares about New Orleans except for New Orleanians and a few others.

This man, Doug Whitmer, was a Bush-era choice. They had a real knack for picking people who existed in their jobs to warm seats and cover for each other when something actually happened, but Whitmer is likely even worse than a mere self-centered lump. You usually don’t get dozens of staff complaints against you over the course of two months unless you are either a very draconian manager but nonetheless very effective at your job, or you actually are the creep that the complaints allege you to be. Considering the outrageous, reprehensible three-plus-year bog-down of the Katrina money, I’d say that the former is probably ruled out. Whitmer has been accused of threatening, bullying, intimidation, racism on the job, and sexual harassment by FEMA-New Orleans employees who work for him. I guess he has “better” ways to spend his time than actually, you know, doing his job.

Naturally, his Washington boss defends him, says that “[he] has lived in New Orleans” (as if that has anything to do with it—plenty of people have lived in New Orleans and not all of them are interested in the well-being of the area), and curtly informs the CBS reporter that if there are problems in the New Orleans office, actions will be taken. Yeah, that sure convinces me. FEMA officials are well-known for the sterling quality of their promises. If positive actions were on FEMA’s agenda, you’d think something might have been done already. The hurricane was three and a half years ago.

But it is not just high-level federal bureaucrats who are to blame for this. The very Congresspeople who, last week, proclaimed to the news media that the reason the Gulf Coast got nothing for recovery was that the existing funds were just “tied up in planning,” must have received some notice of the true situation. I used to work for a U.S. Senator, and the offices constantly get mail from constituents. This little fiasco is more evidence to support my earlier suspicion, which was that most of these Congresspeople really didn’t listen to their constituents or care that much about their problems. But when the media does its job, it sure can be a pain in the rear for them, can’t it?

Since this office is designated “FEMA,” it should be under federal jurisdiction, specifically that of the Department of Homeland Security. This monstrous Big Brother bureaucracy has been widely criticized since its creation, and rightly so. Former Secretary Chertoff should’ve been “asked to resign” (read: fired) in the wake of Katrina, because although former FEMA chief Michael Brown was certainly incompetent, part of the problem was that Chertoff had not authorized FEMA to do all that it needed to do. Now that a new administration is in place, I hope that they will overhaul the chain of command for this bloatfest of a division. I also hope that Secretary Napolitano launches a departmental investigation into these allegations coming out of New Orleans, because if she has the authority to do so and fails to do it, the blood of 2005 (and, unfortunately, some year in the future) is on her hands as well as those of her predecessor. Her boss, the President, seems interested in the Gulf Coast, in contrast to just about everyone else in Washington. Any reforms of the Katrina recovery process will almost certainly need to come directly from the White House.

Update 2:20 A.M.: The Scurrying for Cover Begins!
Looks like some folks got wind of what would be on the news today. This adds an extra layer of meaning to my comment earlier that when the media does its job, Congress tends to act—but that it often takes such things to get lawmakers off their duffs. Some members of Congress are going after FEMA-New Orleans for that office’s incompetence and possible corruption. There’s also talk about an internal investigation in FEMA of this particular office, which is (I suppose) a start, but not a good one—and one that I do not think should be conducted, because it will be a waste of taxpayer money. I still think this will require an independent investigation of FEMA, because agencies in general are notorious for being unable to investigate themselves honestly. Joe Lieberman, chair of the Homeland Security Committee, has said in the last session of Congress that he wouldn’t do such a thing. Again, most likely this will have to be spearheaded by the executive branch, either Obama or Napolitano. But it needs to be done and it needs to be done right. That means independently.

Now if only they would turn their eyes to the Mississippi coast’s “recovery” as well, and consider that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to let insurance companies deny claims to homeowners who had paid in and lost everything they owned in the hurricane. These (ex-)residents were, if they didn’t have money saved elsewhere, then forced to sell their land to Big Industry in order to walk away with something, anything, with which they could start over.

In the midst of all the 2-year anniversary coverage by the media, some of which will be disgustingly smarmy and positive to the point of being an outright lie, let’s not forget about anything attending the tragedy. I intend to mark the occasion later today by viewing An Inconvenient Truth again and considering the environmental aspects of the disaster, both those which followed it and those which I am convinced led up to it (i.e., global warming). The best way to observe the day is to consider what we might be able to do to prevent it from happening again.

March 5, 2007

Why does the Conservative Political Action Conference have any credibility in Republican political circles? It’s apparently little more than a hate-fest in which the speakers run a race to the bottom.

By this time anyone who follows politics has heard about the ugly rantings of Ann Coulter, and her homophobic slur against John Edwards. The condemnation from all sides has been absolutely justified. This woman has been allowed to get away with spewing verbal vomit for far too long without being held to account for it in a meaningful way. She’s the one who, if you’ll recall, made nasty remarks about the 9/11 widows because they held politics other than her own. Now, I’m all for free speech. However, when I say “allowed to get away with” what she does, I simply mean that her brand of political “commentary” should disqualify her from the pundit’s seat that she has occupied for a long time. She has the right to say it, but what she has to say adds no value to the political system and shouldn’t be given airtime.

However, there was another remark made that is, arguably, equally offensive, if not more so. This remark has had very little coverage except on the blogs. I only discovered it myself from the Blog for Our Future coverage, via Crooks and Liars.

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.

Failure of citizenship? Uneducated and unprepared? OK, unprepared, maybe, although that is really glossing over the truth about the 9th Ward. But it doesn’t take an education to know that a monster hurricane is bearing down on your city, especially when the television coverage is about virtually nothing else. (And I am reasonably sure that, despite poverty, most households did have televisions. About 99% of U.S. households do.) They were simply unable to leave because they didn’t have the means to get out.

The financial means. Evacuation is not cost-free.

So, knowing that the hurricane was coming, they went to the Superdome, went to the Convention Center, barricaded themselves in their homes, and waited it out. It was the best they could do with what they had.

As a Southern politician, Gingrich ought to know better. Even Haley Barbour, as much as I dislike him, wouldn’t make a remark like that–if only because he’s too slick a politician to do it. Newt Gingrich apparently has been out of politics for long enough that he’s lost his touch, and now he’s just spouting the right-wing Social Darwinist line without even attempting to gloss it over. “You suffered and died in a tragedy that didn’t have to happen, so it’s your fault for being ‘uneducated’ and poor.” The Social Darwinist part of the American political system really does not comprehend poverty. It doesn’t compute. To them, all the problems in someone’s life that are caused by money can be solved with a quick fix, and it’s the fault of the individual for not taking advantage of this imaginary quick fix.

To return to the beginning of this piece, I think it’s time for respectable Republican politicians to stay away from CPAC. If this is the level of commentary there, then it does no one any credit who attends it.

February 28, 2007

As readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed, I’ve been focusing heavily on the recovery process of Hurricane Katrina lately. Much attention has been devoted to the initial response and its shortcomings, but critiques of the reconstruction are harder to come by.

And now… we come to an issue that is not only being overlooked, but appears to have a very strong public relations effort underway to spin it a certain way.

This is a multi-pronged issue, but in a nutshell, it’s this: Big industry is getting free rein to buy up anything it can get its hands on, with encouragement and aid from the government at several levels. In the meantime, coastal residents and local businesses are having to rely on private charities (as well as an Attorney General who will fight for them against people trying to ruin them financially) to get back on their feet.

It’s fairly common knowledge that war profiteering on a truly grand scale is taking place in Iraq while the Iraqis and our own soldiers watch the country degenerate into total anarchy and civil war. This same type of corporate profiteering, often by the same companies, is taking place on our very own Gulf Coast as well, while the residents of the coast are left to fend for themselves.

This issue deals with the great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and as such, it is intimately related to the housing and insurance problems associated with the Katrina recovery. This story is likely to have some overlap with previous entries.Private charity is a great thing, and it’s stories like this that restore some of my faith in humanity when it falters. However, these stories are deeply, deeply sad. The extent of the devastation in these communities is so great that these organizations, despite their heroic efforts, are swamped. (Read more…)

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